Europe: Defining the Region

Geographers do not all divide the world into the same geographic regions. We do not even agree on what is a continent!

Europe is not really a continent, but the western part of the Eurasian continent.

Where should we put Europe's eastern boundary? Most people extend the European continent eastward to the Ural mountains of Russia since this is the first natural barrier to the east and the included area has cultural ties to the West.

Therefore you often hear the term "European Russia" for the heavily populated and industrialized Russian plain west of the Ural Mountains.

Also, you sometimes hear the term "Central Europe" for the countries that many westerners call "Eastern Europe", since these countries lie between European Russia to the east and Western Europe to the west.

Some geographers include the former communist countries of Eastern Europe in with the Russian realm because of the historical, political, and economic ties the region had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 

Our authors put these countries with Europe predicting that economic and political interactions in the future will be directed west to the rest of Europe, rather than east to Russia.

The authors of our textbook have been writing textbooks for over 20 years. Russia is -  linguistically, culturally, and historically - part of Europe. 

But they separate it out because of the Cold War legacy. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were politically separate from "The West" - Western Europe and the U.S. And that legacy has left a lasting mark.

In late May, 2002,  Russia increased its participation in the military alliance called NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was the coalition of Western European countries that was formed by the US during the Cold War to "contain" the Soviet Union. 

Nonetheless, many put Europe's eastern boundary at the Russian border and separate Russia from Europe and we will follow this designation.  

What other countries are in/out of Europe? 

Turkey is trying very hard to be admitted to the European Union - a supranational organization of 15 European states with 13 more waiting to be admitted. Turkey's government, and many of the people in western Turkey consider it to be a European nation. It is already a part of NATO.

Historically the Anatolian Peninsula - modern day Turkey - was the Byzantine Empire - the eastern seat of the Roman Empire. So almost 2000 years ago the people of this region identified with Europe. Orthodox Christianity was based here and expanded north into Russia, Bulgaria, Armenia and Greece. 

When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the area became predominately Moslem and it is the predominance of Islam which causes your authors to identify Turkey with the Islamic Realm and is at the base of the reluctance of the rest of Europe to allow Turkey to participate as a full member of the European Union.

Many also include the world's largest island, Greenland, as part of Europe, even though it is much closer to North America, because of its historical ties to northern Europe, specifically Denmark.

(n.b.: Greenland's size is greatly exaggerated on the Mercator projection world map below on the left. The actual size of Greenland is comparable to that of Mexico or to Sudan in Africa. The Peters Projection map on the right distorts the shapes of the world's landmasses, but maintains their relative sizes.) See the section on map projections to learn about map distortions.